As we emerge from the COVID lockdown, we have had an opportunity to reflect on what we have learnt during those testing times. What stands out is that remote learning and organisation of school communication is more important than ever in planning our 2021 roadmap.
Continuing the Learning Journey
We started off this year with the launch of the new Learning Moments and Badges modules, enabling you to capture evidence, goals and achievements of students. We initially focused on developing this feature for our junior years and delivering assessment tools outside of the traditional LMS. We are now working to extend the benefits to the entire K-12 environment.
We are particularly excited about continuing the journey with badges. Our future goals for badges include:
- Control over who can see and award certain badges.
- Improved curriculum management, mapping and reporting.
- Making badges exportable via the openBadge API.
- Badge dependencies, allowing progression and multiple steps towards further achievement.
- Control over the length of time an achievement is valid.
- Enabling badges for staff to support PD programs.
Deeper Integrations with our Premier Partners
As always, we continue to work with our partners to support and enhance the capabilities of our platform.
Currently, we are working with Digistorm to add additional authentication options and simplify access to our APIs. We are particularly excited about what Digistorm will be able to do with our Learning Moments API, enabling young children to easily capture learning on mobile devices. Many schools have been looking for improvements related to handling the large quantity of photo data they are collecting at events and a more meaningful way to share these with families. To do this, we are working with our partner GeoSnapShot to develop an automated solution to process, store and share the thousands of images collected within a school community.
With sophisticated facial recognition and privacy features, we will be able to deliver a solution that enables families to easily access images related to their children and restrict the sharing of images if they choose.
Improving the teacher experience
Looking across the core learning areas within the product, we have been investigating how to support teachers in the classroom. Rather than add new features, we are looking to make life easier by improving existing teacher experiences:
- Ensure assessment dates are entered correctly during course import.
- Protect common assessment tasks from modification in classes.
- Simplify importing assessments from a common course.
- Enable improved sharing, collaboration and assessment with Google Docs and Assignments.
- Improved printing support and PDF downloading for continuous reports, rubrics and more.
Empowering our Superusers
We haven’t forgotten the people that work hard to make Schoolbox a success in each and every school, our Superusers. This year, to give back to those who support us, we will be focusing on the administration side of Schoolbox and what would make it easier to manage and support the system.
Together with our Superusers, we have identified the following areas in need of improvement:
- Ease of finding settings and configuration options.
- Simplification and cleanup of user accounts after they leave the school.
- Additional data recovery options, for those accidental deletions.
- Improvement of security and privacy controls for the different staff roles in a school.
Although there is no guarantee that these features will be delivered in 2021, we wanted to provide you an insight into our direction moving forward and our commitment to deliver features and enhancements that are valuable to your school.
We need your input
We thank all the amazing people that have contributed in our forums and spoken with us over the last year to help shape the direction we are heading.
Your feedback and support in user forums is a crucial part of our roadmap development. In our last release 20.2, we were greatly guided by your valued knowledge and input.
So, get onto Schoolbox Help and let us know what you think!
Thanks to everyone for participating in the discussion.
